Duncan Riley – You should take a break

It all started over the weekend – a bitching match going on at Techmeme started apparently by Louis Gray who replied to Duncan Riley’s post on Techcrunch. The comment by Louis Gray

TechCrunch’s Duncan Riley checked in with a quasi-analytic comment this morning

prompted a response from Duncan Riley where he calls Loius Gray a cunt and a wanker. Duncan Riley also says in his post

Notice the put down with “quasi-analytic,” lets not fight on ideas, lets denigrate the messenger.

And on his response, Duncan Riley does exactly that. He describes Louis Gray as

I say A-List somewhat lightly, because the guy who’s come after me is someone who’s called Louis Gray. I’ve been blogging a bloody long time and for a lot of that time I’ve been reporting on the movers and shakers in blogging, and until a couple of months ago I’d never heard of this guy. His about page is as useful as tits on a bull: he does PR for a Silicon Valley technology company and found blogging in 2006. He’s talked about now at the same level as Calacanis, Scoble and Arrington, and yet he’s reached the lofty heights of 735 subscribers in Feedburner; probably more than this humble blog but this isn’t my main outlet.

Which is the opening of his post linked to above.

I found this quite ridiculous and hypocritical of him and said so through a comment on his post (Ah, Duncan was kind enough to delete the comment but I happen to have a copy of it reproduced below)

You say that Louis Gray attacked the messenger? What have you done?
With this idiotic post you have done exactly that.

Practice what you preach hypocrite

To this, Duncan responds in a classic teenage fashion (after deleting the comment). He emailed me with this:

Seriously, fuck off.

Well, that is the background so far.
What are you Duncan? An A-lister? You think you are so great that you can try and thrash anyone and if someone calls you out, you go down to teenage expletives. Grow up dude.
If you cannot take comments and disagreement, then get off the blogosphere. You are being a jerk and behaving like a child.
And Duncan, don’t denigrate the messenger, discuss the idea. Oh, you already do not follow what you yourself write. Mea culpa

What with all the, um, unpleasantness around FriendFeed this week, it reminded me about something that I’ve been thinking on for a while now. There have been a lot of new sites starting up in the last couple of years that are primarily focused on…